{"id":2454597,"date":"2020-02-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-15T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=320948"},"modified":"2020-02-15T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-02-15T07:00:00","slug":"tony-vagneur-not-to-worry-were-safe-on-our-mountain-until-every-weekend-is-three-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/tony-vagneur-not-to-worry-were-safe-on-our-mountain-until-every-weekend-is-three-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Vagneur: Not to worry, we\u2019re safe on our mountain until every weekend is three days"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Maybe it\u2019s just me, but the Aspen Mountain paradigm seems to be shifting a bit. It feels different, too. Of course, like climate, skiing habits are always changing, but it seems to be on a larger scale this winter.<\/p>\n

People are skiing in groups, something seldom seen on the easy-going trails such as Dipsy-Doodle and Silver Bell. I mean, people always ski the mountain like they drive the highway \u2014 in waves, or clusters, if you will. But these new groups I\u2019m talking about have a little tighter formation about themselves than the regular out-of-towners we normally see.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s noticeable, because the skiing styles are relatively foreign to this neck of the woods, even for tourists. You watch a guy or gal make two or three turns and you fairly well know \u2014 they\u2019re not from here, but they\u2019re not from Miami or LA, either. They\u2019re in that middle ground that I\u2019m guessing originates on the Eastern Slope.<\/p>\n

As an aside, it\u2019s interesting to note how many people we can spot on the hill just by their skiing panache. Before you even see them up close, you can say, \u201cWow, Erik got a new parka,\u201d or \u201cLooks like Cindy is on her boards.\u201d Or, \u201cElbert always skis like he\u2019s hauling a toboggan down the hill.\u201d You can\u2019t be anonymous on this mountain, no way.<\/p>\n

Yeah, I know about the local ski gangs, but that clearly isn\u2019t it. Our gangs don\u2019t lap the gondola or Ruthie\u2019s, going for vertical, avoiding the double-blacks, or picking the mogul lines with easy outs. Local gangs ski the mountain, period.<\/p>\n

As Roger Marolt so eloquently put it, the out-of-towners don\u2019t ski the same trails we do. Part of that is they don\u2019t know the mountain like we do. When someone in the gondola says, \u201cWow, Aspen Mountain seems so small,\u201d it\u2019s an obvious sign the speaker just recently got off the bus.<\/p>\n

Naturally, some of these new folks are thrilled to be skiing with the big boys, but they\u2019re not quite sure how it all works. The other day, I came across the hill from Roch and ran into a group of four, dressed rather oddly, with long, flowing jackets, like dusters out of B-rated westerns. Powder coats, they called them. They\u2019d just come down Aztec (newly groomed) and were wondering what to do next.<\/p>\n

They followed me into Spring Pitch, thinking I might know something they didn\u2019t. The crud and bumps were good over there \u2014 they\u2019d have never found it. As I stopped at the top of Strawpile, they came whizzing by, whooping and hollering, as though they\u2019d really knocked it, not realizing that by staying on the groomed, they were missing some excellent terrain on the right. As I came out of the bumps, they were stopped at the island, resting their legs, no doubt.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019m not in this to be bashing people from out of town. It\u2019s to calm the fear that we\u2019re being overtaken by the Eastern Slope crowd. Rest assured. If you saw the Channel 9 report the other day about the two-hour lift lines in Vail, it\u2019s pretty clear they\u2019re not coming here. Oh sure, some of them are \u2014 welcome to good skiing \u2014 but they can\u2019t keep it up; the newness will fade along with the vitality for driving farther just to beat a lift line.<\/p>\n

The other day was one of those special days. There were relatively long lines at chairs 3 and 6, in weather foggy enough to preclude being able to see much. Snow was coming down and people were out skiing rather than huddling up in restaurants to avoid stormy weather. Dedicated skiers on the high ground.<\/p>\n

There was fresh powder on the mountain and I decided to nose around a bit, explore some of my haunts that hadn\u2019t been hit for a while. A couple of those stashes, on the area and in the midafternoon, were untouched, and there was no one around. Maybe no one knows how to get there.<\/p>\n

Getting back on a more civilized part of the hill, I was still all by myself. Wait, there comes Gerry Sullivan, a man who knows his way around the mountain, and he didn\u2019t have time to stop. Apparently, a good stash was awaiting him.<\/p>\n

Two ski bums, the only ones in the area, passing in the foggy white, each with an eye on a personal prize. As it\u2019s always been.<\/p>\n

Yep, there is a change in the feeling of mountain behavior, but I think we\u2019re safe. We lived through it when the gondola was built, when more and more runs became groomed, when prices of everything went up, and even when we got a little longer in the tooth. Unless weekends get longer, we\u2019ll likely survive this, as well.<\/p>\n

If you think it\u2019s crowded now, you weren\u2019t here in the \u201960s and \u201970s. Tony Vagneur writes here on Saturdays and welcomes your comments at ajv@sopris.net<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe it\u2019s just me, but the Aspen Mountain paradigm seems to be shifting a bit. It feels different, too. Of course, like climate, skiing habits are always changing, but it seems to be on a larger scale this winter. People are skiing in groups, something seldom seen on the easy-going trails such as Dipsy-Doodle and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2454597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-18 15:26:51","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2454597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2454597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2454597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2454597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}